An Italian man who went to great lengths to convince everyone that he had lost the ability to walk after being involved in a staged car accident 12 years ago was recently exposed as a fraud.

The incredible story of Roberto Guglielmi, an Italian con artist who managed to fool everyone, including doctors, neighbors and even the Pope, that he couldn’t walk began over a decade ago. In 2007, he came up with a plan to pass himself off as a disabled person and collect the pension offered by the government, but he needed an accomplice to pull it off. At the time, he had someone living in his home who was behind on rent, so he proposed to forget about the payment he was owed if his housemate would pretend to hit him with the car while he was crossing the street. The man agreed and everything went smoothly. With the help of a false medical document, Guglielmi was able to become a paraplegic, even though he could walk like a normal person.

What’s most remarkable about this tale of deception is the extreme lengths that the Florentine went to in order to deceive doctors during mandatory visits to confirm his disability. According to prosecutors, he would inject lidocaine into his legs to numb his muscles, undergo traumatic therapies and use a wheelchair whenever he left his home. For over a decade, no one suspected that he was actually a healthy person with full use of his legs.

A Thai conman was recently arrested and charged with robbery after successfully pulling out a sophisticated plan that involved setting up a fake jewlery store and luring an Indian businessman there so he could steal a valuable diamond.

59-year-old Pipatpongpat Suksawatpipat, the man arrested for the ingenious robbery, was once a prosperous jewlery trader himself, but fell on hard time when he became addicted to gambling a few years back. He went from being one of the richest people in Chanthaburi to having just 40,000 baht ($1,200) to his name, but he recently put that small amount of money to good use and pulled off a scam that would make any self-respecting conman jealous. In just a week’s time, he managed to rent a commercial space and turn it into a fake jewelery store, lure an Indian jeweler there with a 10 million baht diamond, and eventually steal that diamond before riding out into the sunset. Alas, his success was short-lived.

A Thai man recently incurred the wrath of his friends and relatives after faking his own death on Facebook and having his wife ask them for financial contributions for his burial.

Tachawit J.’s Facebook friends thought him to be in good health, so they were left in shock on Sunday, when his wife posted a series of photos of his dead body – complete with cotton balls in his nostrils – on his account, with the caption “Last photo before deactivating his Facebook, love you!”. Tachawit’s most concerned friends and colleagues left comments asking what had happened to him, to which his wife replied that he had died of cancer and asthma – a truly killer combo – after suffering for a long time.

A Florida-based conman who somehow managed to steal millions from wealthy investors all around the world by posing as a Saudi Arabian prince and diplomat was finally exposed after he made the mistake of eating bacon and other pork products at business meetings.

Anthony Gignac, a Columbian-born man who was adopted by a Michigan family as a child, started his grandiose swindling operation in 2015, by setting up a fraudulent investment company, Marden Williams International, to purportedly invest in business opportunities worldwide. Using various aliases, the con artist spent the next two years posing as a wealthy Saudi prince and stealing over $8 million from 26 victims all around the world. Gignac bought fake diplomatic license plates on eBay and put pompous words like “sultan” in the door nameplates of penthouses and mansions where he met with his victims. This was apparently enough to fool people into thinking that he was a real prince.

Jimmy Sabatino, one of Florida’s most notorious and prolific conmen, was recently convicted to 20 years of solitary confinement, after pleading guilty to running a $10.4 million (USD) fraud. He was already in prison at the time, but managed to run a successful racketeering operation with the help of associates on the outside. During his trial, Sabatino told the judge that he cannot stop himself from committing crimes, and requested that he be sentenced to solitary confinement at Supermax, one of the toughest prisons in the US. He claims that the lack of human contact is the only thing that can stop him from conning people.

Sabatino, who has spent most of his life since age 19 behind bars, was serving a sentence at the Federal Detention Center in Miami for violating the terms of his supervised release, in 2014, when he came up with an idea of another con, from inside the prison. He somehow convinced two correction officers at the detention center to smuggle 5 mobile phones for him, which he used to call victims and associates on the outside. Both officers lost their jobs, but neither of them faced criminal prosecution.

A 57-year-old Italian conman was recently arrested and charged with fraud and document forgery, after its was revealed that he had been posing as a member of the Montenegro Royal Family for years. His con was so elaborate that he had even managed to fool many real royals and celebrities.

The man, whose real identity has not yet been revealed, called himself “His Imperial and Royal Highness Stefan Cernetic, Hereditary Prince of Montenegro, Serbia and Albania”, and claimed to be a descendant of the Roman emperor Constantine, and the head of the Montenegrin royal family. He travelled all around Europe in a black Mercedes sporting Montenegrin flags and fake royal insignia, and stayed in luxury hotels, free of charge. To make his claims even more believable, Cernetic set up a website and several social media accounts, where he regularly posted photos of him alongside known royals, like Prince Albert of Monaco, and members of famous aristocratic families, like Savoy, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern.

Alberto Julian Meza, a strange South American con man, was arrested recently in Paraguay for tricking people into believing that he was a lost, overgrown child. The 25-year-old mainly targeted older women – he dressed up in nappies and sucked on lollipops, pretending that he was lost and searching for his mummy. Believe it or not, it worked.

According to locals in the town of Villa Elisa, a suburb of Asuncion, Meza was regularly seen walking around in his adult diapers.. At first they had assumed that he was mentally ill, but in reality, he would fool women into letting him into their homes, and later steal whatever he could when they were fixing him a snack or bringing him a drink.

“I am surprised that the police have only just now arrested him,” said local resident Lara Orta Ornelas. “He has been doing this for years and I know the police have had complaints before, but it’s incredible they never realized the baby is actually a fully grown man.